ACQUISITIONISM
(draft) (worth repeating)
A RESTATEMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY: PROPERTARIANISM’S THREE-FACTOR CAUSAL MODEL
(core)(central concept)(necessary)(innovation)
I. ASSETS (FACTS)
P1) ASSETS: self/body, energy, relations, investment/opportunity
P2) ABILITY: intellect/intellectual effort, emotional reserves/ability, physical ability / effort,
P3) DESIRABILITY: other-acceptance(non-rejection), other-information, other-insurance),
Note that these three are (a) evidentiary in the individual’s experience of his or her life, (b) habitual in the family unit and the information and training of the family unit – and informationally inherited. (c) evident in the assets of the family unit, (c) genetically inheritable.
But what assets do we humans seek to preserve, consume, acquire, and maintain? A rich portfolio that varies from our life itself, time, food, shelter, kin, mates, allies (people to cooperate with), private property (stuff), private commons, public commons, territory, information, opportunity, normative institutions, cultural institutions, formal institutions. The reasons being that as we increase each of these our discount on intellectual, emotional, and physical effort increases.
Through cooperation in a division of temporal perception, knowledge, labor, negotiation, and advocacy, we use the one commodity that is most precious: time, to make everything we desire cheaper – so profoundly so that we actually cannot fathom its scale. By the simple combination of sovereignty and reciprocity; norm, tradition, literature and myth; property, contract and law; money, prices and credit; family(marriage), organization(corporation), voluntary(civic), local, regional, and national government; we convert the little time of our human lives into the production of complex goods any one, even the most simple, the production of which would consume lifetime of an individual.
II. REACTIONS (GENETIC/BIOLOGICAL INSTRUCTIONS/INFORMATION)
E1) Pleasure(reward) vs Pain(cost) (pre cognitive)
E2) Excitement(projected gain/loss) vs Rest (conserve) (cognitive but pre-social)
E3) Aggression(dominance) vs Fear(submission) (cognitive and social)
All emotions describe anticipated changes in state of (P1)Assets. That is all that they describe. Nothing more. They may evolve through complex combinations of assets and emotional reactions, so that we experience a ‘chord’ or ‘symphony’ of emotions. And we might (artists do) attempt to compose such ‘symphonies’ for us to experience. But just as all music is constructed from a limited number of properties, and complexity emerges from its subtle combinations, emotions are constructed from only a small number of properties, and complexity in our experience emerges from dense combinations of those subtle combinations.
Note that by combining these three emotions with the various forms of ASSETS, and the various values of those assets, we can produce the entire spectrum of human emotions in a rich orchestra no matter which emotional framework we wish to describe.
III. THE REPRODUCTIVE DISTRIBUTION OF ADVOCACY
I1) The feminine near term need for inventory and consumption given the fragility and duration of the maturity of offspring. (socialistic/individualistic/offspring)
I2) The immature male need for opportunity to accumulate assets in order to attract and maintain females. (libertarian/individualistic/assets)
I3) The mature male need to preserve costly personal, familial, group, tribal investments (conservative/familial/tribal/preservation)
Note that these differences in reproductive strategy are expressed in our advocacy for the distribution of the proceeds of population density, cooperation within that population density: female egalitarian, male youth individualist, and adult male meritocratic. Each bias reflects the reproductive strategy of the the genders. Each member does in fact contribute to the creation of returns withing a polity (group) as long as he or she doe not predatorially, parasitically, free-ride upon the group’s efforts. Individuals can specialize or develop portfolios of contributions to a polity. And most of us develop portfolios that produce the maximum returns for us given our abilities.
Those portfolios consist in:
The provision of caretaking. The adherence to and policing of norms, traditions, rituals, the recitation of myths. Participation in cooperation of defense, goods, services, and information. Virtuous contribution to the commons through donation and redistribution. Meritorious contribution to the commons through the production of excellence. Status contribution to the commons through the contribution to or production of institutions and monuments. Heroic contribution to the commons by self sacrifice or risk. ( But let us remember that people can also engage in false advertising in order to obtain opportunity and free riding without performance or investment. )
Note that nothing else is necessary to describe all ethical, moral, and social behavior.
REASONS WHY THESE CAUSES ARE OBSCURED FROM US
- The terms used above are analogies that we can reduce to frames of current experience. How our brains record, anticipate gains and losses of the various forms of assets they find useful is still something we must discover. However, in that discipline we call psychology: the operations and variables that constitute the human experience, I have significant doubts whether further refinement of this set of ‘names’ will vary further any more so than have number and note, weight, volume, and velocity. And that all further refinement to psychology will consist largely of subtle expressions constructed upon these terms.
Whenever we change the paradigm of any model that serves our ability to describe phenomenon, it is because we have developed a technology by which the scale of our perceptions and scale of our actions, require redefinition of the model to accommodate the new increases in scope.
- Human conscious experience is conflationary: the combination of perception, memory, and recursive interactions of perception and memory, producing a continuous ‘overload’(conflation) that our short term memories are insufficient to preserve as a state, and where that preserved state would be necessary for introspection. Were we able to capture (freeze) frames of that complex experience in our short term memories we might be able to trace the causal routes through the layers of our brain with a great deal of practice. And in some cases we are able to do that. But because our experience is ‘assembled’ and ‘reassembled’ each time, and because we actually modify it with each reflection upon it, the sheer quantity of fragmentary information would be ‘unfollowable’ except as a sequence of concepts – a sequence that through introspection we can sometimes deduce.
IIII. THE INTERGENERATIONAL DIVISION OF ASSETS (KNOWLEDGE vs ENERGY)
Given youthful poverty, ignorance, energy, and lack of accumulated cellular damage, and mature wealth, and knowledge accumulated at the cost of accumulated cellular damage, the generations engaged (until the 20th century usurpation by government and redistribution from the mature and aged to underclass reproduction) in a voluntary exchange between the generations.
The most obvious is the transmission of care and property between generations of families, but the least obvious is the borrowing and lending of money and interest OUTSIDE of families, and even outside of those who are known to us by use of the legal, finance, and banking system – in one of the most egalitarian but meritocratic means of intergenerational cooperation while preserving accumulated information by which the old could control the risks of the young. Again which was destroyed by government interference in the 20th century through the use of fiat credit and the subsequent empowerment of the financial sector.
Note that nothing else is required to explain various cultural behaviors other than reproductive strategies, moral intuitions for ‘proper/fair’ property and proceed distribution in relation to reproductive strategies. Family strategies and the correspondence of family strategies with the increasing accumulation of various properties, with individual property ownership instead of family currently eliminating the last vestiges of the family as an asset-transfer unit (made possible by the destruction of the family by the government transfer of assets from productive to unproductive individuals).
V. THE INTRA-CIVILIZATIONAL DIVISION OF TEMPORAL SPECIALIZATION
It’s rather obvious that the bronze and iron ages radiated out from the fertile crescent whose seasonal flooding provided reliable irrigation that could be controlled by a warrior elite, the proceeds of production extracted, consumption increased by the elites, and investments in commons produced by their followers.
It is somewhat obvious that the trade routes from northern Italy overland to the north sea, wherein the Venetians provided a navy for the wealthier but more despotic Byzantines and their Conquerors the Muslims, created the foundation for first the failed Carolingian civilization, and the ‘truncated’ Hanseatic civilization. And that today’s european heartland still reflects Carolingian Lotharingia.
It is less obvious that in european civilization, from Spain to the Urals, the same pattern of radiation outward is visible from the north sea down to the Hajnal line, within which northern europeans practiced bipartite manorialism the nuclear, and absolute nuclear family, as well as the common law of sovereign men, as well as rule of law – governance without rule by market means. And then through the catholic countries where they did not, to the eastern european countries where the middle class evolution was late – and truncated by the Russians, to the Russian that civilization that was too young, to experience either the scientific enlightenment, or the reformation to which they were more suitable, and busy conquering the remains of the Mongol’s Golden Horde empire from Belarus to the pacific and into what is today Alaska.
Below the protestant, catholic, and orthodox lines of civilization we see a polar opposite strategy: not one of incremental domestication for profit in pursuit of limiting or eliminating rule: Sovereignty, but one of preservation of ignorance, preservation of underclasses, preservation of family and tribal orders, preservation of tribal conflict, and thereby an ever INCREASING demand for authoritative rule – a rule that is profitable for a large number of religious ‘judges’ and advisors, and an authoritarian militaristic state apparatus. Were it not for the presence of cheaply extracted oil, this part of the world would be somewhere developmentally below south america given it’s indigenous underclass, between rural India and its indigenous underclass, and high conflict subsaharan Africa, and its indigenous underclasses.
And far to the east we have Indian civilization who, thanks to Hinduism has succeed at least in creating a relatively gentle people, and who has (unwantingly) imported anglo logic, and russian economics and politics and law. Chinese civilization that has imported russian philosophy, economics, and politics, and is now importing anglo empiricism and technology. But where indians are optimistically untruthful people, chinese are pessimistically untruthful people. And Russians are opportunistically untruthful people.
What the chinese and russians have had is a military capable of altering the course of the civilization when necessary. This is what the hindus do not have. Perhaps for the simple reason that the continent of india unlike the narrow strips of green that constitution the population centers of russia and china, is simply impossible to rule centrally without an external threat that gives rise for the need to form a military as did china to resist modernity, and russia to provide an alternative to modernity.
THE SPECIALIZATIONS
With this history in mind we can see something quite interestinsg
that the stock market and high risk and highly ‘evangelical’ movements exist in america, and that americans practice scientific law – and that maericans deny the existence of their classes. That the bond market and banking exist in England. That the british have traded Anglo empiricism for a conflation with French Rousseuian moralism and practice moral law. And that the british complain about their classes. That engineering and perhaps the most psychologically precise language and high capital investment and an explicity hierarchy exist in germany along with requisite ‘duty’ more so than empathic ‘morality’. That eastern europe has been truncated but now forms a relatively moral labor force. That Russia provides the military and resources on a scale and practicality that the idealistic utopianism of the american military can never hope to achieve despite it’s technological and operational excellence – which is exactly its primary weakness. No Russian would produce a US military. It’s fragile. It’s just big. What makes american military dangerous is TRUST. Americans fight and maintain formation. and take initiative to win.
So what we see is high risk Americans, tepid risk Britons, low risk Germans, risk averse eastern europeans, and highly risk intolerant if not outright paranoid Russians.
That this civilization from Australia to america to Europe, to Russian Asia constitutes a series of specializations in the inter-temporal demands of the civilization is not so obvious. That’s unfortunate, because no other civilization can manage it.
NOTE: Note that nothing else is needed to explain the differences between these societies other than the atomicity of property due to the advancement of the commercial sector that we call the middle class.
RECIPROCITY AS INFORMATION, AND ASSETS AS DECIDABILITY: NATURAL LAW
Just as voluntary exchange free of fraud is the only test of whether a good, service, or information has been a use of resources, a personal consumption, or waste of resources, voluntary cooperation free of deceit is the only means of testing reciprocity(sovereignty) whether the resource of cooperation (time, energy, opportunity, resources) has been productive, parasitically consumed, or wasted.
When we engage in cooperative exchanges across our various abilities, needs, and biases we discover which goods, services, and information is desired by the market, and we therefore adjust our relations, efforts, and or thoughts, to find a balance between what we desire to do, what is available to do, and what others want us to do.
In this way, through sovereignty, reciprocity, and markets in all walks of life we ‘calculate’ methods of achieving one another’s goals without having the intention of achieving one another’s goals.
We the rely on rebellion, rallying, shaming, ridicule, disagreement, debate, discourse, agreement, congratulations, advocacy, and cooperative action depending upon we agree with or disagree with one ‘ambition’ in the portfolio of ambitions that we are aware of and capable of understanding at any time.
And while only those with errors (mental illnesses – wether physical, emotional, or intellectual) engage in those topics of investigation that are increasingly difficult to reduce to direct experience:, economics, engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, logic, mathematics – because they possess neither a portfolio of investments nor knowledge to trade them;
unfortunately everyone can reduce questions of reciprocity, ethics, morality, politics, culture, and civilization to direct experience because from micro investors to major investors each of us has defacto constructed a portfolio of cooperation. Unfortunately, just as the economics of the family, the business, the nation, and the world, operate by very different and completely counterintuitive, and often opposite rules, such that excellence in one niche is not commutable to another, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and humans of all levels of sophistication overestimate their knowledge.
One of the reasons for teaching and speaking, and legislating in Propertarianism’s Natural Law, is that the logic of law and cooperation is no longer subjectively undecidable, but objectively decidable regardless of norm, tradition, culture, or legislation. And as such we educate in morality by a means as certain as mathematics: because just as mathematics must be constructible by means of operations retaining consistent relations, consent, cooperation, contract and law must be constructible by means of operations consisting of constant relations we call ‘reciprocity’ : the productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer of our assets and limited to productive externalities to the assets of others.
And more importantly, since the invention of the pulpit in prior eras, and the print in subsequent eras, and mass media in our just-ending era, has led to the incremental industrialization of error, suggestion, and deceit, and that we developed reason as a counter to eastern supernaturalism in the ancient world, were defeated by eastern supernaturalism, and then rescued ourselves by empiricism in early modern world, nearly completed the second scientific revolution in Germany before it was truncated by the world wars, and that we have nearly been defeated by eastern pseudoscientific mysticism of the cosmopolitans in the twentieth century world, and given that the thinkers of the last century (darwin, nietzsche, spencer, poincare, brouwer, bridgman, mises, popper, hayek) failed to produce the *advancement* in empiricism that would allow us to refute the pseudoscitsts that attempted the third wave of supernaturalism – this time by even more innovative means (Boaz, Marx, Freud, Cantor, the Frankfurt School).
SUMMARY:
As far as I know all human emotion and behavior can be explained by these three ASSETS, these three EMOTIONS, and the MEMORY of our life experience to date; along with the division of reproductive labor, the division of intertemporal labor, the division of productive labor, the division of class labor in producing commons, and the division of civilizational labor in producing commons at the largest scales.
As far as I know differences in personalities allow us to specialize in niches and as long as we do not err in our assessments of our assets, all personality types both (a) gravitate to empirically available portfolios and the uses of those portfolios, and (b) react rationally and emotionally rationally to the current and future value of those portfolios. (c) and assistance in improving those portfolios is the best that we can do for one another – and what makes us love one another – investing in one another.
As far as I know some individuals are defective primarily in their limited reserves of frustration in relation to their other abilities. As far as I know the classes consist of individuals with increasing inheritances of (P1)Assets, (P2)Abilities, and (P3)Desirability. And as far as I know the classes sort according to familial, associative, productive, reproductive, and political utility to one another.
As far as I know the west and the far east have been most successful because a combination of climate (cold), production techniques (small family farms), aristocracy imposed manorialism (access to land and therefore reproduction), and an aristocracy that aggressively exterminated those troublemakers. Meanwhile the process of reproductive selection among those that remained favored lower impulsivity, lower and slower maturity, and more feminine traits in women, which resulted in domestication of then population through pedomorphic evolution much more so than all other forms of evolutionary influence combined.
UNCONSCIOUS VS CONSCIOUS TRAINING OF THE MIND.
We can vary our assets. We can get fit, we can primp and preen, we can learn manners and small talk, We can learn skills. We can develop relationships, produce and save. But we can only do so to the limits of our genetically inherited abilities.
Therefore, the primary means of self improvement given the limits of our genetic assets, is through the REMOVAL OF ERROR: the problems of the self: ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking. The problem is, that we often cannot tolerate a true accounting of our assets, or opportunity for assets, because the realization that we have empty pockets so to speak, and are totally dependent upon the favor of others, when we are undesirable by others, because we are either a cost or lacking value to others, would remove from us the will to live. It is for this reason alone that Buddhism Succeeded among the poor, and Stoicism Succeeded among the working and middle classes, and science, economics, law, and philosophy, among the upper middle and upper classes: these methods of thought correspond to the means of eliminating fear of falling behind our peers in the constant race with the red queen in all walks of social life.
PERSONALITIES ARE THE RESULT OF A NEED TO COOPERATE AND THE CONSTANT COMPETITION FOR COOPERATIVE ASSETS
If we do not need to cooperate, how complex a set of personalities do we need? we need to be more mobile to find food, we need to be smarter to hunt food, we need to be smarter to outwit competitors, we need to be much smarter to cooperate to outwit competitors – whether within the group or without it.
We must seek to find niches to exploit within group and without group, and within nature by individual means, and within nature by cooperative means. We seek to create allies in cooperation, to join allies in cooperation, and to outwit allies by defection, and to outwit enemies by circumvention, cooperation, or defeat.
But most of our cooperation occurs within group. Most of our evolution occurred because of in-group problems of negotiation.
The band/family was knowable. The family/tribe somewhat knowable. The village/family knowable. The city not knowable, but because of family religion and law and barter, somewhat predictable. The big city is not knowable whatsoever without jobs, law and pricing. The metropolis is not knowable whatsoever without jobs, law, pricing, credit, and mass media – like religion, attempting to force us into peerage. And modernity is was beginning to be terrifyingly unknowable until jobs, law, pricing, credit, and the new distributed media that allowed us to find peers around the world easily.
I suspect the future will be an expansion of interpersonal reputation, legal reputation, credit reputation, and ‘social media’ reputation of some sort – so that we may identify informational peers amidst the multitude of different grains of human sand. And I would expect to see an increase in specialization of identities – if only for signaling purposes – and personalities – as means of adapting – just as we have seen an increase in the specialization of knowledge and labor.
DIVERSITY OF PERSONALITIES EVEN WITHIN A HETEROGENOUS POLITY ARE AN ASSET
Personalities are a means of dividing the problem of the intertemporal and reproductive division of perception knowledge, negotiation advocacy, and labor into that thing we call reciprocity and the benefits of cooperating in increasing scales while taking advantage of both increasingly small niches for those with lesser abilities, maintaining niches, and generating new niches, that destroy the old.
BUT THERE ARE NO LIMITLESS GOODS
(undone )
WE BOUND THE LIMITLESS GOODS WITH VOLUNTARY COOPERATION AND UNBIND THEM WITH VIOLATIONS OF VOLUNTARY COOPERATION.
(undone)
Ergo, the government has destroyed the checks and balances of a heterogeneous polity.
THE HYPOTHALAMIC PROBLEM/BENEFIT AND MODERNITY
(undone)
COMPARE TO THE FIVE FACTOR MODEL – THE “AUTHORITARIAN” or “MONOPOLY” or “CONFORMITY” or “ILLNESS” INDUSTRIAL ERA’s SYMPATHETIC MODEL OF MAN
In every era of history we have used the most sophisticated technology we know of as an analogical model to both describe the introspectively unavailable functions of the human mind, and to justify whatever authoritarian model we wish to impose upon one another. Freud and Jungs attempt to escape Darwin and Nietzsche by fabricating pseudosciences with which they could criticize what they held in disdain made use of the uniformity-industrialism and sexually-repressive-victorian (due to syphilis) models of the day.
Wile in the last century thanks to Maxwell, we spoke physical phenomenon as changes in energy. In the current era, thanks to physicists we speak of physical phenomenon as changes in the state of information. In the past eras we spoke of passions and virtues, then of emotions and wants. and thanks to Hayek we now speak of social science, and now thanks to Turing, we speak of psychology as changes in state of information. In doing so we cast off the imprecision and bias of prior eras, and the attempts at deception of prior political and cultural movements.
The current model of personality that psychologists operate by retains both the authoritarianism of the industrialist and socialist era, with only tepid attempts at reform in response to the findings of the cognitive sciences, and the conversion of pseudoscientific psychology to empirical psychology. The current Five Factor (or six or seven) model in its various forms does in fact correspond somewhat to services provided by brain structures.
FF1) CURIOSITY (INTELLECT-NOVEL) / REPEATABILITY (MEMORY-KNOWN) (psychology): The ability available to find rewards in success through experimentation or the inability to tolerate frustration in failure and the discovery of success in repetition
FF2) EXTRAVERSION / INTROVERSION (psychology): Method by which one processes information: dependence upon self reflection, or dependence upon empathy and communication from others. The limits to frustration we obtain with seeking information from others depending upon our desirability for informational cooperation with others.
FF3) AGREEABLENESS / DISAGREEABLENESS (Psychology): “the willingness to bear small costs of investment in order to identify present and longer term opportunities for gains or consumption and prevent current and future costs or losses.” (byproduct of conscientious ness/extroversion?)
FF4) CONSCIENTIOUSNESS / BLAME-AVOIDANCE:
(undone)
FF5) CONFIDENCE-EMOTIONAL STABILITY / FEAR – NEUROTICISM
(undone)
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law of Sovereign Men
The Philosophy of Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine